ry of the
Forth, with fertile reaches of green pasture-land intervening, and the
little villages of Picardy, Broughton, and Canonmills peeping out from
embosoming foliage, while beyond the silver streak, beautified by the
azure enchantment of distance, glowed in the sunshine the heath-clad
Lomonds and the yellow wealth of the fields of Fife. Did the youthful
poet turn eastward, from yonder favourite lounge of his on Arthur Seat,
the mouth of the noble Firth, dotted with sail, was full in view, with
the shadowy outlines of the May Island, peeping out like a spirit from
the depth of distance, and nearer, the conical elevation of North
Berwick Law and the black-topped precipitous mass of the Bass; while
seemingly lying, in comparison, almost at his feet, was the magnificent
semicircular sweep of Aberlady Bay, with its shore-fringe of whitewashed
villages gleaming like a string of glittering pearls, behind which
stretched the fertile carse of East Lothian, rolling in gently
undulating uplands back to the green Lammermoors. Or if he gazed
southward, did his eye not catch the fair expanse of Midlothian, as
richly cultivated as it was richly wooded, extending before him like a
matchless picture, dotted with homesteads, hamlets, and villages, past
Dalkeith--'which all the virtues love,' past Lasswade, past Roslin's
castled rock, past Dryden's groves of oak, past caverned Hawthornden,
until earth and sky seemed to meet in the misty horizon line of the
Moorfoots? And westward, was not the eye guided by the grassy grandeur
of the Pentland Range, until beauty was merged in indefiniteness across
the wide strath lying like a painted scroll from Edinburgh to
Linlithgow?

Fairer scene never nurtured poet in 'the fine frenzy of his art'; and in
long excursions during his spare hours, amidst the silent glens and
frowning _cleughs_ of the Pentlands, amidst the romantic scenery
clothing the banks of both the Esks, by Almond's gentle flow, and by the
wimpling waters of the Water of Leith, our Caledonian Theocritus fed his
germing genius on food that was destined to render him at once the
greatest and the most breezily objective of British pastoral poets.

From 1707 to 1711 thus did Allan Ramsay 'live and learn,'--a youth whose
nature, fired by the memories of Scotland's greatness in years gone by,
already longed to add something of value to the cairn of his country's
literature. Such, too, were the facts of which, at his request, the
wort